How to Read a Poem Lesson 3A

We’ll begin Lesson 3A of How to Read a Poem with a short lesson on the English language, then we’ll delve into Free Verse and stanza patterns (3B). So, let’s start.

Sixth century English was a heavily inflected language -- that means it used endings on words to specify the grammatical function of each word in a sentence. But both the natural linguistic principle of simplification and the Norman Conquest of 1066, caused those pesky inflections to slowly drop out. We still have only a few of the hundreds we once had  (-s, -’s for nouns, -s, -ed1, -ed2, -ing for verbs,  and -er, -est for modifiers.)

So, that’s good news, right? Yes and no. Something had to take the place of all those grammatical clues that made communication possible. The answer? Word order! 

Let’s see how inflections worked. You remember that a sentence needs both subject and predicate and that nouns can be both the subject and the direct object of a verb. With inflections on nouns, we know which is subject and direct object, so word order makes no difference. Look at these 6 sentences. With Old English inflections, all mean the same thing.

1. James is king.   They all mean this, a declarative sentence.

2. King is James.   This one makes us wonder.

3. James king is.    The next three mean something else.

4. King James is.

5. Is king James.

6. Is James King.    This is interrogative, not declarative.

So you see how important word order is to Modern English. (See so is how important you Modern English to word order) Anything that violates order -- syntax -- is either confusing or meaningless.

So, with that tucked into our minds, let’s go to free verse. The term presupposes two things:  we’ve 1. defined verse or poetry and 2. stated what the verse is free of -- which means we know all that stuff in lessons 1, 2, and this lesson.

Before Shakespeare, the first element poets freed themselves of was rhyme. (Ironically, inflections make rhyming much easier.) Remember blank verse -- unrhymed iambic pentameter? So rhyme which goes back before Chaucer in the 14th century was the first to drop out. The second freedom was from the accentual/syllabic restrictions of Lesson 2. 

However, the 20th century saw two new restrictions -- parallelism and anaphora -- from which we later freed ourselves. 

Regardless of all we’ve freed poetry from, we can never free poems completely from English syntax without opening them either to ambiguity or incomprehensibility.

Before we end this lesson, let’s practice scanning a stanza of “Titanic Force.”

A jagged edge of anger ripped a hole

In me, its icy tip just barely seen

Floating in my Sea of Reality,

Its path obscured by freezing clouds of pain.

Read it out loud to see if it sounds like an English sentence. Remember, never read a poem so that each line sounds like a sentence. Now, you make your scan, then look at mine.

A / jag // ged / edge // of /ang // er / ripped // a / hole //  

                5 iambs/iambic pentameter

In / me, // its / icy / tip // just / bare // ly / seen //   

                iambic pentameter

Floa / ting / in // my / Sea // of / Re / al // i / ty, // 

                trochee, iamb, anapest, iamb only 4 feet

Its / path // ob / scured //by / free // zing / clouds // of / pain. //   

                iambic pentameter

See why we call this style accentual/syllabic!